Actual Causes and Thought Experiments

Four theories proposing determinate relations of actual causation for Boolean networks are described and applied to 16 cases. All four theories are founded on the idea that actual causation is based on results that appropriate experimental interventions would produce. They differ in their accounts of the relevant kinds of experimental interventions. The more complex theories are motivated by treating Boolean networks as idealizations of noisy gates and by Patricia Cheng’s work on human causal judgement. 1 One debt for this paper is to the late David Lewis, whose seminar on causation Glymour attended in the early 1970s, and where the problem addressed in this paper, and Lewis’ approach to it, were the focus of discussion. We are indebted to Bruce Glymour for helping to fix drafts of this paper. Christopher Hitchcock provided many helpful exchanges and ideas. We thank Patricia Cheng for a correction, clarification, and much else, and Laurie Paul for providing a preprint of her work with Ned Hall. Any corrections would be gratefully accepted. Work for this paper was supported by grants NCC2-1295 and NCC2-1377 from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition at the University of West Florida.